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Epic Online Space Battle
New submitter nusscom writes "On July 28th, as has been reported by BBC, a record number of EVE Online players participated in a record-breaking online battle between two alliances. This battle, which was essentially a turf-war was comprised of over 4,000 online players at one time. The load was so large that Crowd Control Productions (CCP) slowed down the game time to 10% of normal to accommodate the massive amount of activity."
This is the largest battle to ever occur on EVE Online.
Less chance of diseases at least.
Video games are for old kids.
FTFY.
Tomorrow is another day...
Men will be kids
We saw basically the same story six months ago and already discussed it.
Are we gonna put it on the front page each time they add a few people to their cap?
I started my account after hearing about the last huge battle a few months ago and very coincidentally uninstalled EVE the day after this battle. When the game is fun, it's great, but there's SOO much downtime in between PVP fights (PVE, PI, mining and such get old fast). CCP took the approach of more content rather than focusing on playability and new players get a truckload dumped in their laps. The UI is murder on new players and even the plugins could use a major upgrade or at least more consistency with colors. I had major friendly fire annoyances with color tags that were too close or misleading.
Game could be fun if there was more interaction, but from my experience there's a lot of spinning ships in station and yacking on Mumble. My two recommendations would be for CCP to create true CCP-sponsored corporations that stage lots of PVP and training against each other (much like the Blue and Red do) and do away with the non-functional NPC noob corps where new toons get dumped. Second, they need to improve the UI standardize that overview. The colors and codes are head scratching and sometimes *way* too similar.
The curve is just too high for people looking to have fun and not turn the game into a way of life. I felt barely competent after 4 months of play.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
Real world is noticeably lacking in large-scale space battles (at least, to the best of our knowledge). Swings, roundabouts...
"Its the same boring shit about how eve's terrible servers can't handle all the buffered state updates and slows to a crawl"
Or to see the half-full glass, it's a story about how EVE is the only MMO game that really even attempts to let stuff happen on this kind of scale; it's the only major single-server MMO, i.e., the only one that doesn't just cheat by only having as many people on any given 'instance' of the game as their server code can handle.
You do. Only a complete lack of response would show otherwise.
And then you hid your screen name, afraid that others will find out that you actually care.
Which means that you not only care - you care whether others perceive that you care. And you try to obscure it by pretending not to care.
Amazing that you have time to think of anything else, actually.
The aliens who are monitoring the video game and looking for those with aptitude. ;-)
Before I tried out Eve, I thought these epic space battles were technological breakthroughs. At the time, I was playing WoW was was restricted to 40 players and some mobs up at once. When I actually played Eve, I was quickly disillusioned. There are not many real-time controls in the game. You pick an action, then when the game decides when it's time, it executes it. It's a queuing system and it's nearly turn-based, like Civilization. You aren't controlling your space craft in real time. I am not as experienced as a lot of you guys are and you may have other input, but I quickly gave it up because it was boring as hell to do something then wait 10 seconds until it completed.
like tears in rain...
why on earth does slashdot have to report this as news each time it happens?
Occasionally they need a gaming story that does not involve a Blizzard game. :-)
4000 in the same battle, out of 36k online in the game. There was a large battle a few weeks ago too, at least until CCP mistakenly crashed the node while trying to reinforce it with more hardware. But this one was pretty epic.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Next up, in order to fight lag, all new major alliance wars will be conducted as Play by E-Mail.
Actually in the very early 90s that is close to how EVE-like games worked. For the one a friend wrote and operated it was a big open ended turn based game that had one turn per day. It was EVE-like in the sense that it was space based, involved exploration, exploitation, trade, alliances, government (security and taxation), pirates, smuggling, etc.
Amazing that you have time to think of anything else, actually.
I read your post imagining it was being spoken using Vizzini's voice. Much more amusing that way.
Of course, this being so, there is ZERO achievement when the parent company handles a battle of any given size. "Our system simply slows down under stress" is no kind of technical achievement whatsoever. So, why is the story worth reporting? Because a record number of players fancied a rumble?
I think you misunderstand how their system works. When an event such as 4000 players in the same place at the same time all shooting at each other happens (no other MMO has come close to doing this), time in the game actually slows down in order to allow the servers to process everything. Now even though your ship is traveling at 300m/s, it will take it 10 seconds in realtime to travel 300 meters ingame. If your gun cycles in 6 seconds, it now takes it 1 minute of realtime to cycle. Game balance is unaffected, since everything scales at the same time.
It's also notable in that it fails gracefully. As more players enter the system, TDI begins to kick in and everything slows down in proportion to the server load. Eventually the server will crash if enough people show up. However, it's a huge improvement over abrupt crashes and/or disconnects once some load (I think they could semi-smoothly get to around ~600 people pre-TDI) over the more traditional system they used to use (which is still used by pretty much every other mmo out there).
I was there (TM) It's not just the battle. It's the buildup. For 4 days we worked the system. Disrupting the enemy, destroying infrastructure. In the background spies worked there magic and Logistics move the materials of war into position. The phyc-ops and propagandist people boosted moral an got people to log in and participate. The battle is just one of the fun bits. 4000 pilots where just in the system. Without a doubt over 6000 pilots were involved on the day and closer to 10,000 for the buildup. EvE is serious spaceship business and this whole war is business. In EvE we are not ashamed to admit. We went to war for the Space monies.
I don't know, some of those Prostitutes in game are pretty...well, sketchy at best.
If the only way you can accept an assertion is by faith, then you are conceding that it can't be taken on its own merits
I don't think you understand. Each 'solar system' in EVE runs on a single core - the system is not multi-processor friendly within a single solar system.
They moved the 6DVT(where the fight happened) system to the same blade server as Jita(the huge trade hub which regularly hosts around 1000-1500 people, most inside a station) but on a separate core.
400% of normal traffic to a single processor. That's impressive. Also, it's running python, so there's that as well.
If the only way you can accept an assertion is by faith, then you are conceding that it can't be taken on its own merits
Men will be kids
As long as it's for the sake of national security. Remember, in online chat rooms, chicks are chicks, guys are chicks and kids are cops.
The mind conceives, the body achieves, the spirit manifests.
The scientists changed their minds; glass is considered a solid again.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
In big battles you aren't some sort of superman. You are a grunt. One of many, many cogs in a giant organization playing your role and trying to not get squashed.
The real joys of Eve are in both the subversion of structure or the creation and management of it. Being a market manipulator and crashing a market segment just because it gains you an extra 20% on your investments for several hours or creating your own empire within an empire complete with command structure, commerce, human resources and manufacturing facilities. Being a kingmaker because of your connections and savvy or a destroyer of alliances through a diverse intelligence network are all part and parcel of such an immense environment to certain people.
People that go into a game like Eve and expecting to be a walking god like every other game, being in a never ending war and felling no loss or casualties, having their hand held and directed where to go for greatness, or not having to make many allies and a few friends just to survive will always be disappointed.
Eve is too much like real life. The people that have the most fun are those that are already winning in life or could if they didn't have some specific issue in their way. The rest just see Eve as work. Nobody wants to indulge in escapism by entering a world where they feel the same as everyday life.
CCGCKC got it...
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
The load was so large that Crowd Control Productions (CCP) slowed down the game time to 10% of normal to accommodate the massive amount of activity.
"Its the same boring shit about how eve's terrible servers can't handle all the buffered state updates and slows to a crawl"
Or to see the half-full glass, it's a story about how EVE is the only MMO game that really even attempts to let stuff happen on this kind of scale; it's the only major single-server MMO, i.e., the only one that doesn't just cheat by only having as many people on any given 'instance' of the game as their server code can handle.
So, the story is their code and single-server suck because they can't handle the load, right? If the game has to slow to 10% how does that prove anything good? I can run a simulation on my home computer and have it run at 10^-100 slower than it would run on the cluster at work. It will run, but be slow as glass flowing at room temperature. When they can do that at 100%, I will be impressed.
Or you can play a game like Everquest 2 where the lag can get so bad sometimes (because SoE blows most likely) that it takes 20 secs for your button press to register, if not longer.
And that is with 24 people in the zone.
Be seeing you...
It's actually pretty slick how they throw in some uniform time dilation to ensure fair and timely performance across all n number of pilots in a fight while the resources are dynamically allocated to reinforce the fleet battle nodes. Definitely an improvement from the prior lopsided disconnects and variable frame times. Rather than the network or cluster deciding the battle, the players do. Since they are the *only* game in town that provides this sort of scenario, I find it rather intriguing to hear about the ceiling being pushed further and further. There are many more questionably appropriate and even dull topics that are seen daily here. Internet spaceships and clever realtime server management don't seem so unwarranted.
Surprising that this topic is getting as much hate as it is. I can say as an 'on again, off again' EVE player that I really enjoy hearing these stories. As it goes, life is just too demanding at the moment and as the saying goes, "EVE is the best game I don't have time to play." To each their own I suppose. If these stories were not posted here, they would still make my news feeds, so I could do without if that would satiate those who find it offensive.
I'm amazed how much effort people put playing games these days. I honestly think some like games (like EVE Online) are more like jobs than entertainment, if what I've read is any indication. Shit, if some people spent their time in the real world doing and learning things with the same level of zeal and dedication as they do in the virtual world, we might all be Tony Starks. :)
Having said that, the virtual world provides more immediate payoff for your efforts compared to the real world sometimes... which is probably what makes gaming so addictive.
They seem to have a very self-superior attitude as though they are just better because they play a Bettar Game(tm) and if you aren't good enough to hang with them then screw you, you suck! However on the other hand they hate the other MMOs because they take players away. The wish there was no WoW, no Rift, etc so that people HAD to play EVE.
Basically, what they really want is a large quantity of people who are not good at the game that they can pick on and hate on. They want to be the ruling class that has a lower class to shit on. They are bullies, more or less.
He's mad at you because you tried the game and left, rather than stuck around to give him another potential target to beat up.
i don't play eve (or any other MMO), but have been following it for a year. this is "stuff that matters" for 2 reasons
first is the server load. ccp swapped out the node that normally hosts the home world and used it for this battle, they slowed things down in a planned way (time dilation), and there was lag beyond that. so this battle was the limit of their technology. if ccp is able to handle battles like this, the battles will get bigger, so what comes next, from a server and software standpoint, should be interesting
but maybe the more interesting aspect is that outside of the game, the 2 coalitions have built up technology infrastructure for organizing and coordinating the players. prior to the battle there was a huge push to motivate players to log on similar to the promotional blitz for a new game or a movie. and during the battle much of the communication happens outside the game itself - multiple channels of mumble, jabber and the web
it's news when twitter enables the arab spring. and it's news (to me) when 4000 geeks get together using online tools and coordinate their actions to achieve some goal (however useless that goal might be)
as for the game itself, i played for a few hours and found it boring. it's nominally played in a huge 3d world, but the locations are largely limited to small regions around a 2d "grid". the number of ships and weapons is mind-boggling and complicated, and the actions all more or less amount to selecting an from a menu, eg you don't aim at a target, you select it from a list. so after a few hours i found myself wishing it had a command line interface and quit
My blog
guessing that they just picked the most "prestigious" source. there's been a lot written about the technical aspects of the battle on reddit - here's the best that i can find at the moment:
http://www.reddit.com/r/Eve/comments/1j8sjz/ccp_explorer_says_theres_no_cap_in_6vdth/
the technology and organization outside of the game is also interesting - thousands of people acting in a coordinated manner to achieve a real-time goal using technology (mumble, jabber, irc) is news - even if the goal is (much) less impressive than hacking the linux kernel
My blog
http://www.stackless.com/
They are using Python 2.7:
http://community.eveonline.com/news/dev-blogs/stackless-python-2.7/
Great discussion of pros and cons of Stackless:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/588958/what-are-the-drawbacks-of-stackless-python
Here's an interesting page with a few nuggets of info. In the discussion section, some people claim that the game used to crash with space battles as small as 100 ships. Clearly the game has been improved since then.
http://highscalability.com/eve-online-architecture
If you are really interested, here's a talk from PyCon 2009 that goes into some detail on what they do with Stackless. They had some problems that only showed up on the crazy load of a real system, so they had to go live with some code to test it!
http://blip.tv/pycon-us-videos-2009-2010-2011/stackless-python-in-eve-pt-2-1959372
P.S. A couple of good trailers:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HrrVDV_NsNo
This one bored me at first but then got much better as the music got going.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=euMjOHgb9A8
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
There's a little gathering in the Pennsylvania hills this week.. but they use sticks.
Www.pennsicwar.org
it's the only major single-server MMO, i.e., the only one that doesn't just cheat by only having as many people on any given 'instance' of the game as their server code can handle.
Anarchy Online merged their servers earlier this year and now only runs a single world server, and while there are instances for missions (think 'dungeons') the world server itself really does just shove all the players together.
Now, whether Anarchy Online can boast 4000 active players is another matter entirely ...
-=This sig has nothing to do with my comment. Move along now=-
That url is just too close to www.peniswar.org for comfort...especially for stick-fighting!
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
Do you need time to play it? It uses the progress quest mechanic for player skills, doesn't it?
Yes (assuming you mean that it uses game-time based skill acquisition, where you set up a list of skills you want to acquire and your character slowly learns them whether you're playing or not). But unlike most modern MMOs which have interesting solo games, it's only really worth playing if you can get deeply involved in a guild (or corporation, to use the local terminology), which demands quite a bit of time in most cases.
Don't know if you were being sarcastic, but EVE doesn't use levelling
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
Don't know if you were being sarcastic, but EVE doesn't use levelling
And it's not exactly a 2D grid like the GP suggests. There are over 5,000 star (solar) systems but each is basically full size. It's true that like a normal star system, the overwhelmingly vast majority of that is empty space, but you can be anywhere within it. Most of the action does take place around celestial bodies, space stations, star gates, and anomalies, but EVE does a good job of making a galaxy feel mindbogglingly huge, which is appropriate.
FYI, CCP did not slow anything down. TiDi kicks in automatically when server load goes up.
However, in the event of an anticipated big fight, CCP will move a system to a "reinforced node" (e.g. an extra beefy server). Of interest, though, is that many fights this year have not been entirely anticipated, resulting in TiDi being the only mechanism for load handling in play. For example, Asakai was the result of an unplanned misclick - it was supposed to be a small skirmish, but turned into a massive battle when a titan pilot jumped into the middle of the enemy fleet instead of bridging his fleetmates in. TiDi + unreinforced node = interesting mechanics, in which the fight is slowed down to 1/10 time, but most of the rest of the universe is running at normal speed. In the past, fleet battles were usually over in minutes, often with half of one fleet dying before they could even load the grid. Now they can last hours, long enough for reinforcements to arrive and massive escalation.
I've played EVE off and on (more off than on) since launch... I just came back from a five year break, I think I'm going to wind up quitting again in not too long. That said, reading the news of what's going on around the edges of the galaxy is pretty neat. I just don't have anywhere near enough time to participate in shit like that, and the game can easily get very boring if you're not in on the nullsec action.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
It is simulating a few more objects than those muds though. For example, each player is likely to have 5 drones (mini robot spaceships), which takes the number of moving entities that have to be simulated up to 24000...
SURELY NOT!!!!!
Hehe,
A friend said the fight got on Slashdot, so I just though I should mention that /. user number 42, got some kills in this fight ;)
Click here, for a free 21-day trial :) https://secure.eveonline.com/trial/?invc=e3af1093-bced-4da3-969a-c5788532ed93&action=buddy
Fly safe, guys! :)
magg